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Review of Masakage Koishi Honesuki

Masakage Koishi honesuki

The knife is stainless clad with AS and kurouchi finish. The handle is an octagonal handle made of cherry wood with pakka wood ferrule.

Blade length: 154 mm (tip to heel)
Weight: 131 g
Blade hight: 38 mm
Blade is 5 mm wide just after the handle, 4,5 above the heel.
Blade is 3,5 mm wide 7,5 cm from the tip
Blade is 2,3 mm wide 1,5 cm from the tip (where the blade curves down towards the tip)
- From this point it fairly quickly goes to one mm or less.

It was quite sharp OOTB, and I broke down three chickens on the day of the delivery using the “factory edge”. It performed very well and was easy to use. It very quickly felt at home in my hand.
Even though it has fairly thick blade its performance is outstanding and it feels very well suited for its original purpose. It feels both nimble when using the tip for going through the meat, and sturdy but easily handled when going through the joints.

The knife was pretty sharp OOTB. After using it shortly with the factory edge I couldn´t resist trying to improve its sharpness.
This is my second Masakage knife and I was able to turn my first of their knives into a considerably better cutter, after a little thinning and some sharpening, than it was OOTB. This knife is stainless clad with shirogame steel.

The honesuki is my first AS knife and I probably underestimated its hardness when I took it to the stones. I started on a 3K stone followed by a Suehiro 6K, then a leather strop with green compound and a leather strop without any compound. The knife cuts really well after this (as well as before ), but I expect it can get a lot sharper. I spend quite a fair amount of time on the stones – maybe 30 min. or so. In retrospective I think I should have started on a lower grid – maybe 1000K. This because the primary bevel mostly became nicely polished but didn´t change its shape as much as expected. I did try out different angels and did in fact remove an expected amount of the stainless cladding.
My prior sharpening experience comes from Cromatova steel, VG 10 and shirogame steel. I also was pretty careful and didn´t apply much (if almost any) pressure when sharpening.
All in all I can definitely recommend this knife to anyone looking for a honesuki knife. See below for pics.

Hmm... I also took some pictures but I can´t figure out how to upload them. I´m not too clever with a computer...sorry

There are several threads in the Support forum about posting images and uploading them. I've found the easiest method is to upload them to a hosting service like Photobucket or Picasa and create a link to them. Follow the instructions in this thread and you should be able to post images: